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Editor’s note: The following first appeared on the Windows blog TuneUp. It is reprinted with the permission of the author.
Written by: Tibor Schiemann, co-founder of TuneUp Utilities
For the longest time, there was a chorus of gamers forecasting the death of PC gaming. But the number of naysayers is rapidly evaporating—recent reports show PC gaming is now poised to overtake consoles by 2014. And in some ways, this trend has been years in the making if you consider that, unlike consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360 that are based on six-year-old hardware, PCs can be upgraded and tweaked to accommodate the newest games.
In fact, recent blockbusters such as Diablo 3 and Max Payne 3 are designed to consume serious amounts of CPU resources, thrash your hard disk and give your graphics card a major beating. With PCs, you can make adjustments so that your computer can endure this, whereas consoles simply leave you with a suboptimal experience. But if you want to actually enjoy this “PC advantage,” you’ll first have to ensure that your computer is truly equipped for gaming. After all, behind software such as AutoCAD or video-editing programs, gaming ranks as the most resource-hungry application, so your PC should be prepped to handle the onslaught.
 The specifics of how to ready your PC vary based on your machine, but there are nine tips that I’d recommend to nearly any gamer—no matter which computer they own.
Update Your Drivers
This should always be the first step you take when tuning your gaming PC. In fact, retail PCs—even gaming rigs—usually come with older drivers that fail to deliver full performance. For instance, I have a mid-level gaming PC, an Alienware X51, and it came with a graphics driver that was already eight months old upon purchase.
To upgrade, I’d look at what both NVIDIA and AMD are offering. NVIDIA recently released its 300 series of drivers, promising a 23% performance improvement for newer games. And for NVIDIA users looking to squeeze the last possible bit of performance from their systems, consider the company’s free beta drivers. But remember, these versions have not yet gone through WHQL, so they might be buggy or instigate crashes. AMD also offers drivers for its HD Radeon on its support website, but it’s always wise to check the company’s game blog for beta releases of the AMD Catalyst.
Another word of caution: don’t just pick the latest driver, because new doesn’t necessarily equate to best. Rather, listen to the gamer community and read forum comments to make an informed decision. Also, keep in mind that it’s not just the GPU that needs regular updating. Chipset, sound and network drivers tend to have an impact on performance, too.
Close and Get Rid of Apps
Common sense, but commonly ignored advice. The more programs running in the background, the slower your games will run. It’s that simple. Each active application consumes CPU cycles and RAM, impacting hard-disk performance. This means shutting down PhotoShop and iTunes, closing web browsers—everything. Nothing active should be in your taskbar when you’re gaming.
 Also, go through the list of installed programs on your PC, figure out which of these you don’t need and uninstall them. And finally, get rid of start-up applications, which are those programs in the taskbar tray. None, even the critical ones, are needed for gaming. There are ways to turn them off using the very rudimentary “msconfig,” or there are some tools on the market that can also help with this.
Defrag or TRIM Your Disk
In Windows 8, Microsoft has integrated the TRIM command into the Disk Defragmenter — to access this, simply hit “Optimize.” Windows 7 doesn’t offer this, but make sure that the TRIM command is regularly executed. TRIM allows Windows 7 to tell a solid-state drive (SSD) which files should be deleted and completely erases the corresponding data blocks. The moment a file is deleted from an SSD, Windows 7 not only updates the file system (as it normally would), but it also informs the SSD which data blocks can be removed. These blocks are marked as free so that Windows and third-party programs can use them. To see if TRIM is enabled, open up a command prompt by clicking on the Start orb and typing “cmd” into the search bar. Right-click on the first result (“cmd”), and click “Run as administrator.” Next, type in the command “Fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify,” and hit Enter. If this returns the result “= 0″, you’re good to go! Otherwise, TRIM isn’t supported and needs to be enabled. Try entering the command “fsutil behavior set DisableDeleteNotify 0″. If that doesn’t help, a firmware upgrade might be necessary to enable TRIM.
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“Make your PC better than a console”
My first inclination was to laugh, because I think that is a given for any serious PC gamer. Even buying a mediocre PC these days will set you up with a better equiped gaming machine than any existing gamebox.
But I do realize that there are many beginners who could use a few tips.
A pc is a game system without good games and a good way to buy games
” unlike consoles such as the PS3 and Xbox 360 that are based on six-year-old hardware”
Yes dude the 360 launched in 2005 with tech from 2006. Could you really be that clueless? Even the Cell was made in 2004. I’m not sure what makes you think these companies wait til launch day go out and buy the best current parts, then suddenly make millions of consoles in a day or two and ship them all over the world.
Fact is the tech in consoles comes out years before they are released.
It is true that a PC has far more potential for gaming than a console.
However, that potential isn’t all about higher resolution textures (after all a badly designed high res texture is still badly designed).
PC games are routinely littered with overhead because developers make the assumption that everyone with a PC has resources to spare, overhead that consoles wont tolerate, which means you are far more likely to see Z-fighting, seemingly random fps drops, stuttering and other annoyances on PCs than you will on the same game on a console.
Then of course you get the PC elitists who regularly give me cause to facepalm with their “Where’s the Dx11?” and “The textures are too low res” whines about every second game that gets released.
Yes PCs have more power and more potential and when games use that they can be special, but developers need to stop using that as an excuse for sloppy optimizations (or a total lack of them) and PC gamers need to stop using it as an excuse to berate developers who do make an effort (anyone remember Crysis 2 with it’s high performance extremely optimized engine which simply garnered Crytek a bunch of angry hatemail about a lack of Dx11 even though they made Dx9 do things no-one else had before and faster to boot) and celebrate the ones who just add special effects for the sake of it (what I like to call shiny brick syndrome, because a brick isn’t a reflective surface yet plenty of games seem to think it is).
“Then of course you get the PC elitists who regularly give me cause to facepalm with their “Where’s the Dx11?” and “The textures are too low res” whines about every second game that gets released.”
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I could not agree more. Most of the time I wonder if those ‘elitists’, as you call them, would actually be able to see the difference between a game that uses Dx9 and one that uses Dx11.
Personally I do not care at all about whether a game uses Dx9 or 11. What I do care about is being able to run for example GTA IV with maximum view distance and maximum traffic in the streets, because that actually makes a huge difference in how the game feels, in how you experience it.
You also mention Crysis 2. I loved that game and was very, very surprised about the incessant whining that arose from certain gaming forums. I thought it looked beautiful as is and I believe it is the best solid and spectacular shooter I have played in 2011/2012, even though I deplored its less open level structure.
And even though it looked spectacular it ran smooth as butter even during the most spectacular actions and explosions. I think the whiners do not even realize what Crytek did there.
“A pc is a game system without good games and a good way to buy games”
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@tanto
I do not get that at all.
It is simple: The reality proves you wrong. You obviously have no idea what you are talking about.
Never has gaming on PC been so good as in these years. We have soooooo many good games that it is impossible to play them all.
Plus we are virtually buried in superb user made content in the form of mods and expansions.
I keep lists of the future PC games that I want to play and if I look at all the AAA titles that are supposed to get released for PC in the next three months alone I will need an extra life to get around to it. And that is only the AAA titles.
So, really, you are talking crap.
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And saying the PC has no good system to buy games is ludicrous. Never heard of Steam, or Origin. And the normal retail system works fine also (I prefer retail), especially since we can buy incredibly cheap over the internet.
Multiplatform games are much cheaper in general for PC than what consoles have to offer and we get incredible discounts via Steam for example.
Plus we have a gaming system that is on average 10 times as powerful as any console to date. And when your next gen consoles will get released they will guaranteed be inferior to even my 3 year old gaming PC I have now.
So, tanto…
You might want to think about it a bit more….
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